DVD playback was fine on Mandrake, but under Gentoo it stalls every couple of seconds for .2-.5 seconds. The audio gets out of sync quickly and becomes very noticeable in half a minute or so and gets worse.

In both cases it was using Mplayer and the TV Out on the Dxr3 with the dxr3 patch installed.

Could it be that I'm using a kernel with pre-emptive option turned on?

I don't think it is a DMA issue with the drive, that gets out at least 5MB/sec on the 64MB test (second that is always slower) and it is with all DVDs..

Under Mandrake I didn't have any problems, and yes vo= dxr3 and ao is the em_ device.

It certainly can't hurt to make sure DMA is enabled. I know I was experiencing the exact same problems you described. DMA solved most of them and the --cache option in mplayer solved the remaining ones.

--kurt_________________The problem with political jokes is that they get elected